Wednesday May 30th in Boyle Heights - join us for a free workshop on using open data to spark community change! Learn how to obtain and use information from City databases about the people, assets, and businesses in your neighborhood to help your Neighborhood Council get grants and plan outreach campaigns. Please bring your own laptop or tablet [...]

Thank you to the 80 amazing Neighborhood Council members who joined us Monday night at the Deaton Auditorium in Downtown LA for the first-ever Citywide Outreach Gathering! Before the formal presentations began, EmpowerLA's Tom Soong kicked off the gathering by using his 19 years of Neighborhood Council experience to announce (over the PA system, a [...]

If you're a Neighborhood Council Outreach Chair or Committee member - or if you're a boardmember interested in taking your Council's outreach and stakeholder engagement to the next level - please join us Monday evening, April 30th, for a Citywide Outreach gathering at City Hall (room TBD). Snacks, beverages, and parking are all provided. RSVP [...]

City Clerk is hosting two more Election Workshops next week to help shape the 2019 Neighborhood Council Elections process - Monday 3/19 6-8 PM in Canoga Park, and Thursday 3/22 6-8 PM in South LA (click through for workshop location details.) The City Clerk will be overseeing Elections administration for Neighborhood Councils, while EmpowerLA will [...]

On February 21, EmpowerLA Director of Outreach Tom Soong and FUSE Fellow Aparna Mukherjee hosted an excellent and eye-opening workshop at LA City Hall with social media guru Sree Sreenivasan for staff from EmpowerLA and other City departments. Sree has served as Chief Digital Officer for the City of New York, the Metropolitan Museum, and [...]

Good photo titles can greatly improve your Neighborhood Council’s online presence and at the same time, make your outreach more ADA accessible. Learn how to create effective, attention-getting image titles, and where to apply them. This is Part 5 in a series on how SEO (search engine optimization) can increase your Council’s online presence and [...]

When someone searches for your Neighborhood Council online, your meta description is the first thing they see. Meta descriptions are the short website summaries Google and other search engines display, so it’s important that yours clearly describes who your Council is and what you do. Here’s how to find yours, and how to write a [...]

Courtesy and relevance are vital to creating content that search engines favor. This week’s SEO how-to focuses on using keywords effectively to ensure that your webpages, blogs, and social media posts are connecting with stakeholders looking for what your Neighborhood Council has to offer. If you haven’t read the first two articles in our series [...]

This is the second article in an ongoing Outreach Tip series on SEO and Neighborhood Councils. Successful search engine optimization is driven by keywords and phrases that are correctly chosen and applied. This week, we talk about how to choose the right keywords to help your stakeholders find you online. If you haven’t yet read [...]

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the art of being findable online. While SEO is an entire industry and field of expertise, there are a few simple things you can do to make your Neighborhood Council easier to find by those who are looking online for your Council or for the kind of community services [...]